US-Based CBS Sports, an outdoor outfitter, has leveraged the solutions offered by Lightspeed Commerce to create a more streamlined and effective retail business.
Carson Searcy, Co-owner of the retailer, says that Lightspeed Commerce has been a game changer for efficiently ordering products for his store.
“I don’t have the budget or the manpower to have someone entering everything in and doing inventory,” Searcy said. “For us, it would be better just to have that person out on the sales floor selling. For me to be in the back doing inventory instead of out selling stuff is completely useless.”
“I can train somebody to enter the orders and can learn how to upload it just as easily. So it takes the job of two people and turns it into one person,” he said.
Searcy, Co-owner of CBS Sports and the son of its founder, said the outdoor outfitter has items for sale ranging from footwear to clothing, ski and snowboard in the wintertime, kayaks, canoes, wakeboards in the summer. It has a huge emphasis on footwear with many major brands.
“It’s really what people need to get outdoors, or what they need on their feet,” said Searcy of the company which is based in western North Carolina, in Morganton, about 45 minutes from Asheville in the foothills.
“It started in 1985 by my father, Bryan. We’ve been in the same location for 39 years. He started it as more of a team sporting goods business, and it’s morphed into more of an outdoor store rather than team sports. We still do a little bit of soccer and basketball in terms of product, but nothing like what he originally was doing. It’s been a major shift over the past 20 years, I would say.”
CBS Sports has one brick and mortar store of about 10,000 square feet.
“We are looking to get into ecommerce. We originally did ecommerce, and then during COVID, inventory overall, across the board, was so low that we just kept everything in house and stopped ecommerce to just do brick and mortar. And it’s done very, very well for us, because we’re not competing with anyone else.”
In 2021, Searcy said, the retailer looked to bring in a new point of sale system.
“We went from pretty much no point-of-sale system to bring Lightspeed on because of the potential with the NuORDER integration and the integration of ordering through a B2B business, and then immediately having it update into our inventory. So all the SKUs, the UPC’S, everything immediately transferring between the two. That was the major draw,” said Searcy.
“I would say 20 to 25 per cent of our vendors are using NuORDER as their B2B system, so we use NuORDER now to order a year in advance.”
NuORDER is a closed loop B2B trade network by Lightspeed for brands to pass product information and enable ordering for retailers directly within their POS.
“When the order is shipped from the vendor that we use through NuORDER, we can click and drop the order into our point of sale without having to manually enter everything in. So what would normally take a couple hours is going to take 10-15 minutes, if not realistically, five minutes,” said Searcy.
Searcy said the company is developing a new website through Lightspeed. CBS Sports uses Lightspeed for payment processing and for inventory payment processing, NuORDER and ecom.
“The biggest thing for us because everything’s streamlined and it’s very user friendly, it saves us a ton of time instead of being in front of the computer or with customers. That was the biggest drawback to ever bring in a point of sale. It was how much are we going to be pulled away from customers and in front of a computer? And for years, the choice was to stay away from this as much as possible because we want to be in front of customers.
“Now we’re spending maybe five per cent of our time and 95 per cent of the time in front of customers. So it’s huge for us, because something that would normally take 100 per cent of our time is only taking five per cent. Time is the most important asset for us. If I’m having to do something on a computer and I can’t walk away from it, somebody comes in, or somebody has a question, that’s a customer, I’m going to have to stop what I’m doing every single time to help that customer. So to be able to do it immediately and very quickly is the most important thing.”
Lightspeed Commerce is a one-stop commerce platform, empowering merchants to provide the best omnichannel experiences.
Founded in Montréal, Canada in 2005, Lightspeed is dual-listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange. With teams across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, the company serves retail, hospitality and golf businesses in over 100 countries.
For more information on Lightspeed/NuORDER, visit www.lightspeedhq.com/partners/b2b
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